RE: Resolving references against base URIs

At 18:15 02/04/15 +0100, Brian McBride wrote:

>First: the problem RDF is trying to solve.  The current RDF specs have 
>encouraged the use of the following idiom:
>
>   <rdf:Description rdf:about="#foo">
>     ...
>
>The value of the rdf:about attribute is turned into an absolute URI 
>reference by concatenating the '#foo' with the URI of the containing document.
>
>This causes problems.  Folks copy the file from the web to their hard 
>drive so they can work on it in a plane, and the uri changes to something 
>like file:c:\temp\....rdf and this is really useless for rdf users.

There are two cases:

A) RDF documents (i.e. Content-Type: application/rdf+xml)

If you have: <rdf:Description ... rdf:about="#foo">

Then you *may* want the #foo to refer to whatever application/rdf+xml
says, and may ideally want to say that #foo refers to <xml:base#foo.


B) RDF embedded in other documents (XHTML, SVG,...):

Here the meaning of the fragment identifier is defined by the format
these fragment identifiers appear in. If you have

              <rdf:Description ... rdf:about="#section1">

then #section1 refers to e.g. Section 1 of the the HTML document in
front of you, independent of xml:base, and you don't want to change
that!

Regards,    Martin.